Self-Control or State Control? You Decide

This book is both theoretical and practical. It can help you to live a happier life, be a better person, and enjoy the benefits of freedom and responsibility. Self-control is the alternative to the Nanny State, the Prohibitionist State, and the Welfare State.

Self-Control or State Control? weaves together case studies with scientific, historical, and philosophical insights to create a handbook for free people who want to live in free, peaceful, cooperative, prosperous, and just societies.

"This important book is in the tradition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in which self-control is necessary in the service of decentralized processes of human socio-economic betterment. State control can never substitute for self-control without destroying freedom and all that is human in both society and economy."

—Vernon L. Smith,

2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics,

George L. Argyros Endowed Chair

in Finance and Economics,

Professor of Economics and Law,

Chapman University

"Each essay is a little gem in its own right, but taken together, the book is a rich source of insights into the classical liberal vision of what is possible if only we take back what we have too readily ceded to the state."

—Douglas H. Ginsburg, Judge,

US Court of Appeals for

the District of Columbia

"Tom Palmer’s latest collection is an amazing guide on how you and I can grow into liberty, in mini-essays ranging from personal psychology to banking regulation. The word ‘responsibility’ in its modern sense of ‘ethical self-control’ came into English around 1800. It’s no accident that 1800 was also about when ‘the liberal plan of liberty, equality, and justice,’ as Adam Smith had put it first took hold, as against the ancient commands of lords. Yet nowadays a new feudalism is growing up. State control is reinventing lordly command. Time to stop it. Time to take personal responsibility. Time to grow up."

—Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished

Professor of Economics, History,

English, and Communication at the

University of Illinois at Chicago,

author of Bourgeois Equality:

How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions,

Enriched the World (2016)

"Life is full of difficult choices. It requires courage to take responsibility for your own life and carve your own path. However, that’s also the best way to ensure a successful future and a prosperous, healthy society. If I were a young person pursuing a productive and rewarding life, I’d buy a copy of this book and study it carefully."

—John Mackey

Co-Founder and Co-CEO,

Whole Foods Market

"Tom Palmer’s new book masterfully integrates the sciences of human life to provide the knowledge of how to care for ourselves and our families and communities without using coercion. If more people knew what this slim book explains, the world would be freer, more prosperous, more just, and happier. That’s pretty good for a short book."

—Peter Goettler

President and CEO,

Cato Institute

Self-Control

or State Control?

You Decide

Edited by Tom G. Palmer

Students For Liberty

Atlas Network

This work is published under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.

You are free to reprint or republish for any purposes provided that you attribute credit to the editor, the authors, and to the publishers: Atlas Network, Students for Liberty, and Jameson Books, Inc. Terms and conditions are specified at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

Published by Atlas Network in cooperation with Jameson Books, Inc.

JAMESON BOOKS, INC.

Ottawa, Illinois

Essays printed with the permission of the authors.

Edited by Tom G. Palmer

Cover Design by Robyn Patterson

For information and other requests, please write Atlas Network, 1201 L Street NW, Washington, DC 20005.

For bulk orders, please call Jameson Books, Inc., 800-426-1357 or use the mail order form on the last page of this book.

Some rights reserved 2016 by Atlas Network and Tom G. Palmer.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-89803-177-5

Contents

Preface

1: The Great Choice

By Tom G. Palmer

Responsibility and Freedom

Freedom and Respect for Law

Freedom or License?

2: How Brain Chemistry Explains Human Freedom and Helps Us to Realize It

By John Tierney

Radishes, Chocolate, and Glucose

Building Character

The Free Society and Its Friends

3: Life in the Nanny State: How Welfare Impacts Those Who Receive It

By Lisa Conyers

A Brief History of the Welfare State

How Welfare Works

Health Costs of Social Welfare Programs

The Welfare–Work Conflict

Work and Happiness

4: Does Consumer Irrationality Justify the War on Drugs?

By Jeffrey Miron

A Framework for Debating the War on Drugs

Is Prohibition Desirable Policy?

Conclusion

5: Responsibility and the Environment

By Lynne Kiesling

Introduction

What Are Property Rights?

Why Do Property Rights Align Economic and Environmental Incentives?

Property-Based Environmental Policy in Action

Conclusion

6: First Person Singular: Literature and Individual Resistance

By Sarah Skwire

7: Rules and Order without the State

By Philip Booth and Stephen Davies

State Rules or Market Institutions?

Planning without Government Planners: Housing and Development

Regulation without Government Regulators: Banking and Finance

Self-regulation of finance in the United Kingdom

Rule-making institutions in financial markets

Conclusion

8: The Welfare State and the Erosion of Responsibility

By Nima Sanandaji

Roosevelt’s Concern

Unintended Consequences

The Lutheran North

Welfare States Rely on Norms

The Chicken or the Egg?

The Theory of the Self-Destructive Welfare State

Norms Change Slowly, Over Generations

Even Nordic Welfare Norms Follow Roosevelt’s Prediction

Nordic Policies Aim to Reverse Erosion of Norms

Toward a New Welfare Contract?

Collapsing Norms in an Oil-rich Welfare State

A Class of the Socially Poor

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Welfare?

A Way Out Of or Into Poverty?

Reagan and Roosevelt Were Both Right

9: The Self-Controlling Individual in Society and Community

By Tom G. Palmer

The Myth of the Purely Rational Individual

Are Individual Freedom and Responsibility Culturally Specific?

Historical Dimensions of Individual Freedom and Responsibility

Historical Contingency

Individuality and Moral/Political Individualism

Origins of Liberal Individualism

Conclusion

10: Philosophical Issues of Freedom and Responsibility

By Tom G. Palmer

Levels of Freedom and Responsibility

Can There Be Moral Responsibility without Freedom?

Freedom and Responsibility in Society

Is There Freedom in a World of Causes and Effects?

Responsibility to Others

Responsibilities for Outcomes

Empirical Freedom vs. Higher, Truer, Authentic Freedom

From Higher Freedom to Collective Self

11: Increasing and Improving Your Own Self-Control

By Tom G. Palmer

Appendix

Useful Guides and Tips for Increasing Self-Control

Training and Maintaining the Willpower Muscle

The Power of I Won’t, I Will, I Want

Changing Habits

Thinking Clearly . . . and Avoiding Mental Potholes

Meditate Your Way to Self-Control

There’s Always More to Read

Online

About the Editor: Tom G. Palmer

Endnotes

Preface

"From Maximus: mastery of self and vacillation in nothing; cheerfulness in all circumstances and especially in illness. A happy blend of character, mildness with dignity, ready to do without complaining what is given to be done."¹

—Marcus Aurelius,

Meditations

Who am I? What is freedom and how do I achieve it? What is a good life and how do I achieve that? How do I live the life of a free and responsible person? How am I related to others? How should I behave and how should I expect others to behave? For what am I responsible and for what not?

Should some people use force to control others? How does control through the state function and what are its effects? What is self-control, what are its benefits and its costs, and how do I achieve it?

Young people may be especially likely to pose those questions, but those questions are not only for youth—they’re for every stage of life.

They’re what this short book is about. Such questions aren’t topics only for professors of ethics and metaphysics; they’re questions for every thinking person. They’re questions for you. Moreover, understanding freedom and responsibility involves much more than some narrow intellectual specialization; serious thought on those questions must also draw on economics and history and psychology and neuroscience and sociology and art and spirituality and so much more. You’ll find all of that in the book in your hands.

The ideas in this book can help you to live a happier life—to be a better friend, co-worker, student, family member, citizen, thinker, businessperson, in short: to be a better person. You can achieve a life of freedom. Freedom is not aimless irresponsibility, but is inseparable from responsibility. Grasping both is an adventure, an act worthy of a human being.

Freedom and responsibility will also help you to create or to strengthen free societies. A key to freedom is to understand that we live freely together, not in isolation, but in societies and communities. It means that just as our freedom is respected, we respect the freedom of others. We accept the responsibility to respect the rights of others. To live freely is to live with respect for the rights of others, as well as for one’s own. To live freely is to refuse to submit passively to control by the state, but to be responsible for one’s own choices.

This is not a book of secret truths that, grasped in an instant, will solve all your problems. In fact, achieving a life of self-control, freedom, and responsibility takes effort, but it is within your power. Such effort can be heroic, but need not be; normally, it’s about slowly acquiring the habits of responsibility. Several chapters discuss the practices and institutions that help us to achieve those habits. They show us the benefits of improving our self-control and contain directly useful insights and tips for achieving self-control, as well as guides to other works that will help you progress further on the path to freedom and responsibility.

Solving social problems requires effort, but effective coordination of effort requires freedom and is generally hindered—not helped—by force. Various chapters explain the history of self-control and how societies of free and responsible individuals have solved and can solve complex problems and how, through freedom, we can achieve peace and prosperity.

Each chapter of this book can stand alone. You can read them in any order; no chapter requires that you have already read another. You can dip into the book without having to read it all. You may find some parts engaging and others less so. It’s your life and you can spend it as you wish. I do hope, though, that some small part of your life will be spent on the chapters in this book, because what they offer may make the rest of your life better, freer, and—ultimately—happier.

Tom G. Palmer

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

March 30, 2016

1

The Great Choice

By Tom G. Palmer

Can there be freedom without responsibility, or responsibility without freedom? Can we choose to be free and responsible? Why should it matter? Here the terms are clarified, the issues defined, and the case made for choosing the life of responsibility and freedom.

"They [the holders of authority] are so ready to spare us all sort of troubles, except those of obeying and paying! They will say to us: what, in the end, is the aim of your efforts, the motive of your labours, the object of all your hopes? Is it not happiness? Well, leave this happiness to us and we shall give it to you. No, Sirs, we must not leave it to them. No matter how touching such a tender commitment may be, let us ask the authorities to keep within their limits. Let them confine themselves to being just. We shall assume the responsibility of being happy for ourselves."²

—Benjamin Constant

Each of us faces a great choice. Shall I quietly accept the system of state control or shall I stand up for self-control? Self-control offers a life of freedom and responsibility. It enables us to realize our dignity in peace and harmony with others. It is a life worthy of a human being. It’s the foundation for prosperity and progress. State control offers a life of obedience, subservience, and fear. It promotes the war of all against all in the struggle for the power to control the lives of others. Self-control is a clear and simple principle applicable to all: every person gets one and only one life to live. State control has no clear and simple principle and invites conflict as individuals and groups struggle to control the state, and thus each other, or to evade control by others.

Free people are not subservient, but neither are they uncontrolled. They control themselves. Taking control of your life is an act of both freedom and responsibility. In fact, the two are so closely connected that one cannot hold onto one without the other.

Dependent children tend to seek freedom without responsibility; independent adults embrace both. The life of freedom and responsibility offers satisfactions only available to those who take control of their own lives. The life of freedom and responsibility is the life of an adult, rather than a child; of a citizen, rather than a subject; of a person, rather than an object. Our own well-being, our happiness, is not something that we can expect from others or that is delivered to us by the state. Governments are properly instituted among men, after all, not to secure our happiness, but to secure our right to the pursuit of happiness. We are responsible for being happy ourselves.

Responsibility and Freedom

Responsibility: For some the word conjures up images of old people lecturing young people about sitting up straight, doing their homework, and writing thank-you notes to elderly aunts. Unsurprisingly, we’re expected to think it’s boring, tedious, a diversion from our enjoyment of our freedom. The goal of freedom, the images suggest, is to escape responsibilities.

In fact, embracing responsibility is neither boring, nor tedious, nor a diversion from freedom. Being responsible entails at times doing things that are unpleasant or even great sacrifices, but embracing responsibility provides the greatest of human satisfactions. Embracing one’s own responsibility is in fact an adventure and an act of daring. We deserve to be free because we can be held accountable for our acts; because we can make choices; because we can exercise self-control. Responsibility is not a burden we must bear to be free; the awareness that I did that is what makes freedom a prize worth fighting for. Responsibility is the key to the realization of freedom.

We do not deserve our freedom merely because we have desires or impulses. We deserve to be free—to control our own lives—because we are morally accountable: to each other, to God (for those who believe), and to our own consciences. As one of history’s most influential moral philosophers wrote hundreds of years ago,

A moral being is an accountable being. An accountable being, as the word expresses, is a being that must give an account of its actions to some other, and that consequently must regulate them according to the good-liking of this other.³

Adam Smith went on to explain that the development of moral consciousness entails accountability not only to others but to ourselves, for what we seek is not merely to be praised, but to be praise-worthy, two goals that may resemble each other, but which are yet, in many respects, distinct and independent of each other.⁴

As social creatures, we seek to become praise-worthy, or admirable, but in order to attain this satisfaction, we must become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct. We must endeavor to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them.⁵

Becoming impartial spectators of our own character and conduct enables us to earn our own self-esteem. As Smith noted, The man who applauds us either for actions we did not perform, or for motives which had no sort of influence upon our conduct, applauds not us, but another person. We can derive no sort of satisfaction from his praises.⁶ Such satisfaction is possible in no other way than by embracing responsibility.

Freedom: For some the word conjures up images of anything goes, of disorder, chaos, immorality, license. Unsurprisingly, they consider freedom frightening. As a consequence, many have believed that order and virtue must be imposed at the expense of freedom. They equate responsibility with submission to the commands of others. Some have even promised that such submission, although it may destroy what we ordinary people consider our freedom, promises a higher freedom, one far superior to what they dismiss as merely empirical or bourgeois freedom. They promise an ecstatic freedom that can only be found when our actions are directed by the wise and the good, or at least the powerful.

Freedom is not the same as license; responsibility closely connects freedom with virtue and self-command. The connection was made clear by one of history’s greatest champions of freedom, a man who was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, a man who achieved freedom for himself and for millions of others. He is known by the name he chose for himself: Frederick Douglass. Douglass wrote in 1845—as a former slave who liberated himself—of the holidays allowed to slaves by their captors. Such moments of seeming freedom were portrayed as acts of benevolence by the slaveholders, but were in fact deployed as safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.⁷ The slaveholders sought to sink their captives in depravity, rather than offer them a respite from slavery:

Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labeled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed: many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly so, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.⁸

For Douglass, freedom was found not in the drunkenness and vice encouraged by the masters, but in the dignity of self-assumed responsibility. He learned the measure of freedom when he, as he put it, "got hold of a book entitled The Columbian Orator" and was captivated by a dialogue between a master and a slave in which the slave refutes the master’s arguments for slavery and persuades the master to emancipate him.⁹ The effect of those arguments on Douglass was powerful: Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it.¹⁰

Attempts to substitute state control for self-control generate unintended consequences that are often far worse than the situations that state control is ostensibly intended to improve. The intentions of legislators or administrators are one thing and the consequences of changing incentives are another. To take two prominent examples, Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University exposes the terrible unintended consequences of the War on Drugs (crime, overdoses, spread of diseases, and more) in his chapter for this volume and journalist Lisa Conyers in her chapter examines the dependency that is created by welfare state policies, usually, but perhaps not always, as an unintended consequence of those policies.

One can never legislate or choose outcomes directly; all legislators or rulers can do is to change the incentives that participants in social interactions face. Thus, actions may be outlawed because the legislators think they’re bad. It does not follow that, after the rulers have spoken, no one will take those actions anymore. Understanding that, rulers specify punishments, from fines to imprisonment to death. It still does not follow that no one will take those actions.

• Freedom to produce, buy, sell, and consume drugs is restricted or completely suppressed in many countries by law. Drugs are illegal in the United States, yet the prisons are full of people who produced, bought, sold, or consumed drugs despite the legislators telling them not to do so. Many millions of people were not dissuaded by the prospect of jail sentences, despite the extraordinary violence and the hundreds of billions of dollars deployed to change their behavior.¹¹ The experience of alcohol prohibition is being repeated; merely banning a substance does not mean that people will stop consuming it and is likely to generate consequences that the advocates of the ban did not anticipate.¹²

• Responsibility to make decisions about saving for one’s retirement all over the world was taken over by governments, ostensibly to invest their earnings wisely, help them to provide for their old age, and create bonds of solidarity among generations.¹³ In the United States wages are taxed and the taxes are not invested for the future, but churned into a Pay As You Go system that is financially indistinguishable from a pyramid scheme and that accumulates massive unfunded liabilities over time. Wage earners were told that their compulsory Social Security payments were being matched by contributions from their employers, when in fact 100 percent of the employer contribution came out of their own pockets, as it was money the employers were paying to hire them and so the money was merely taken from the wage earners by government. The money was paid out immediately and replaced by nothing more than an IOU.¹⁴ Rather than creating intergenerational solidarity, people were encouraged to lobby for more and more payments unrelated to their contributions¹⁵ and unsustainable burdens were shifted to younger people.¹⁶ The system has already turned cash negative, meaning that the accounting fiction of the Trust Fund has been revealed; social security is financed by a pyramid scheme, not through investments or savings.¹⁷ When people are told that their retirement will be taken care of by government, it turns out that they consume more and save less. Moreover, when the costs fall on one group and the benefits on another, the incentives created lead people to seek benefits and avoid costs and generate a myriad of conflicts, including intergenerational conflict. Self-control is never perfect, but state control is no improvement.

Freedom and Respect for Law

Harmonious social order is possible only when individuals are free to control themselves and to coordinate their actions voluntarily with others. A harmonious society rests on respect for the freedom of each member. Harmonious social order emerges not from commands backed by violence, which are more likely to disrupt order than to establish it, but from respect for the general rules of free societies that delineate spheres of freedom and responsibility for each individual.¹⁸ The institutions of free societies—including manners and mores, markets and prices, persuasion and discussion, debate and deliberation—provide the mechanisms by which people coordinate their behavior voluntarily.

Many have believed, and some still do, that order can only be created by force guided by reason and will. The planet is littered with the graves of the victims of that ideology. The reality of attempts to create heaven on earth through such planning has been not order but what the economist Ludwig von Mises called planned chaos.¹⁹ Sloane Frost, an expert in health administration policy and a founder of Students for Liberty, showed the irrationality of interventionist planning in a study of health care provision. As she discovered in her research, rather than any coherent and rational order,

We get one intervention piled on top of another, with the bottom so far down hardly anyone remembers how the process started. The systems become embedded in daily life, as well, so much so that people never bother to ask how they got that way. What’s worse, because they’re not coherently planned, but lurch from crisis to crisis, they are sometimes described not as state interventionism but as free markets or laissez faire by people who don’t take the time to understand the network of interventions and to trace out the incentives they create, how they affect behavior, and how they lead to unintended consequences and then more interventions.²⁰

Commands may be suitable for armies, but in the attempts to replicate the planned orders of armies, command-based interventionist policies in fact disrupt existing and emergent functioning patterns of coordination and create not more order, but disorder. Systems of general and stable rules succeed where commands fail, because they allow people to form reasonable expectations of the behavior of others and allow them the flexibility to adapt to changing situations.²¹ But even if society could be ordered like a vast army, the order that would emerge would be far less complex than the orders created by free cooperation. If order can be compared to music, the orders of free societies resemble not the cadences of military marches but the emergent orders of jazz ensembles.

The rule of law is an essential ingredient in freedom; each person, including government agents, bears responsibility for observing the rule of law. The rule of law is not the same as issuing or obeying specific edicts, orders, and commands backed up by force, but entails general rules, such that

under the rule of law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action. Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that